Social Stratification in Late Byzantium

This book provides an analysis of the system of social stratification in Late Byzantium (mid-13th to mid-15th c.). This includes the ideological infrastructure governing social relations, and the major valued resources (wealth, honours-offices, ancestry, occupation, education, lifestyle) the possession of which defined the status of a person. It delves into cases of social mobility, in an attempt to identify the strategies employed to achieve ascent, such as social assimilation.The major model of social stratification was created by the degree of the possession of the most important resources of Byzantine society: wealth, offices and titles, and ancestry. Society was divided into an elite with different internal groupings, the urban middle social layers and the independent peasants and the simple soldiers in the countryside, and the dependent social class in cities and countryside. The book explores also the different social communities and networks. Outside the nuclear family, the most important association was created around an elite household through patron-client and wider kinship relations. Finally, it explores the degree of inequality in the distribution of the political and economic power. It includes two case studies, further exploring some crucial arguments. The first is an analysis of the social structure and relations in a provincial milieu, Serres, and the second focuses on Constantinople, an urban milieu, in the last century of the empire, when some major changes occurred. Eventually, the deficiencies inherent in Byzantine society are recognised as one of the main factors behind the collapse of the empire.